In a week when Israel bombed Iran, and Iran bombed Israel back, and a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were assassinated, and a United States senator was wrestled to the ground for daring to ask a question, Brian Wilson died. The press noted the death of the brilliant founding member of the Beach Boys almost as an afterthought — there were so many more pressing things to report that week. Besides, as Republican Senator Joni Ernst tactfully remarked recently, “We’re all going to die.” Senator Ernst is right: We all are going to die. So why make a big deal over the death of one 82-year-old rock star?

The answer is that when someone with talent as prodigious and unique as Brian Wilson’s dies, they take their talent with them. Doubtless Wilson’s songs will live on in recordings, and other artists will render their own interpretations of them as well, but the book of Brian Wilson’s oeuvre is now closed for all time. We will continue to hear what he left us, but we will hear nothing of what he might have created had he lived one year, one month, or even one week more. That is as it should be: Artists really owe us, their fans, nothing. Although we sometimes think they do.

Because the power of an artist can transport us from our own humdrum existences and make us feel enhanced by the experience, we sometimes expect them to serve as exemplars for other aspects of life. But talent isn’t like that. Rather than simplifying life’s everyday demands, talent can complicate them. Part of an artist’s attention is always away in the studio or at the keyboard. The car’s check-engine light is flashing? The middle-school principal wants a meeting? The IRS has sent a certified letter? For an artist with outsized talent like Brian Wilson’s, these aren’t commonplace annoyances. Rather, they’re greedy distractions gobbling up precious time his talent wants for itself. The tension can be overwhelming. Or, as in the case of Brian Wilson, horribly destructive.

In “Love and Mercy,” the biopic of Wilson’s life, there’s a scene of a recording session where one musician gasps, “He’s having us make sounds we’ve never heard before.” But Brian Wilson heard them, in his head, all the time. Those unique sounds were the reason, early on, he stopped touring with his fellow Beach Boys. He had to choose how best to spend his time: performing or creating.

Wilson chose creating, and so, over decades, his oeuvre grew and matured from bouncy, catchy songs about hot rods to exquisite melodies about love — Paul McCartney considers “God Only Knows” one of the finest love songs ever written.

But even some of the Beach Boys’ earliest albums such as “Little Surfer Girl” include plaintive melodies like “In My Room” that foreshadowed Wilson’s longing for comfort and safety, a longing that will dog him much of his adult life and ultimately drive him to drinking, drugs and paralyzing depression.

Wilson was very public about his demons, and sometimes the public’s reaction was not kind. But some of us admired his candor and his bravery for having the courage to still perform while feeling so vulnerable. Well into his 70s, Wilson still made his fans move to his music and set their thousands of bodies swaying as one, so that an entire audience became a single being sending good vibrations across time and space.

Over the decades, Brian Wilson’s fans numbered in the millions, while his demons remained principally aimed at one target, himself. Brian Wilson’s music may have blown people away. But it never blew anyone to bits. This enormously talented son of California never dropped a bomb on anyone. Nor assassinated them in their home. He just made music, an artistic contrapuntal response to the exploding blasts heard elsewhere across the globe.

And now he’s gone. He’s left us to join the choir of angels, where doubtless he’ll tweak the heavenly harmonies of the cherubim and seraphim, and set their little angel feet moving to a propulsive backbeat. Rest in peace, Brian Wilson. And thank you.

Patricia Schultheis (bpschult@yahoo.com) is a local writer. Her books include “Baltimore’s Lexington Market” (Arcadia, 2007), the story collection “St. Bart’s Way” (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2015), and the memoir “A Balanced Life” (All Things That Matter Press, 2018).